Standing behind me in the supermarket queue today, an elderly lady was berating her 40-something son for adding a Mars bar to the shopping trolley. He was unrepentant so she decided to involve me. 'He shouldn't be eating Mars bars! Should he?'
When I said politely there were worse things, she poked him in the stomach and said, 'I thought you'd side with me! Look how fat he is!'
The poor bloke looked so humiliated that I lost the politeness and told her that eating Mars bars wasn't a moral issue, whereupon she turned her back on me.
It made me reflect, again, on how far our society has complicated the simple do's and don'ts of God-given morality, and replaced it with pseudo-morality dictated by culture and fashionable guilt.
In the UK, perceptions of morality have got so muddled that people may feel more guilty for failing to eat their five-a-day fruit and veg than for failing the hungry two-thirds of the world who eat little or nothing at all.
But Christians, at least, should escape this confusion about what is or is not a moral issue - surely? The gospel of Jesus is, literally, 'good news for the poor', hope for the despairing and inclusion of the marginalised. I'm privileged to attend churches where this simple good news of God's love for human beings is preached lucidly and unequivocally. From the front, that is.
But among the congregation, even inside the church, other 'gospels' are preached as though they were gospel truth, and are presented as moral issues.
Hot topics expounded with missionary zeal include: fundraising for the church (who is 'good' and who is just not doing their bit); diet ('good' equals low calorie, 'sinful' equals chocolate); practices and expressions of personal spirituality (good, bad or just different?); willingness to conform; whether old hymns are holier than contemporary worship music; compliance with other people's preferences; agreement on what constitutes 'fun' or 'fellowship' and whether people who come from traditional church backgrounds are less 'in the Spirit' than liberals.
No wonder there's so much confusion about moral values outside the church, and no wonder Christians are perceived as hypocritical, judgemental, prejudiced, superstitious or out of focus.
If the gospel is going to be clearly understood in a world that confuses a moral with a Mars bar, it needs to be clear to those who preach it first - nothing added and nothing taken away.
Otherwise, what's being presented as God's truth is yet another set of man-made rules - a very poor substitute for his perfect law.
Monday, 26 October 2009
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Dodgy Dad
Children who love their dad but clearly see his moral failures sometimes do a cover-up job.
They pretend that their dad is not absent, when he is, or that he always provides for their needs and meets their requests for help, when he doesn't, or even that he doesn't abuse and frighten them and others.
Family members may not only pretend to outsiders that Dad is good, but pretend to each other: his lapses in compassion or integrity are glossed over as they assure each other 'How lucky we are to have such a great Dad!'
At its worst, the cover-up goes deeper: a person pretends to himself or herself that nothing is wrong with the way Dad rules the family's life and crushes its happiness.
But at some point the evidence demolishes the pretences, and at that point the family member has a range of choices.
- He/she can consciously try even harder to cover up Dad's failure to be a good dad;
- he can go silent and hope the other children manage to keep believing Dad cares about them really;
- he can rebel and throw Dad out of his life;
- or, he can sit down with him and see if Dad will listen to his concerns, share his heart, and explain why he acts as he does.
Some people become cynical about God. They suspect that all the happy Christians who claim to love him and get so fired up about singing his praises are doing a cover-up job for this 'good Dad' who seems to turn a blind eye to the fact that babies die, people develop diseases and deformities, and the innocent and vulnerable seem to bear all the brunt of the world's aggression.
On the evidence available, some throw him out without a qualm.
Others wrestle silently with their doubts, not wanting to challenge other people's faith in God but deciding privately it's not valid.
But others go to the trouble of trying to get to know him, not on the previous level, but questioning him honestly about their perception of what he's doing in the world.
If faith is based on forcing yourself to believe, when inwardly you doubt God's integrity or even his existence, it's not faith: it's a cover-up job for someone you see as needing the protection of human beings.
If God is God, if his ways are not the same as our ways but are - as he claims - 'as far above your ways as the heavens are above the earth' - then he doesn't need us to cover up for what we see as his deficiencies.
At this time of year, all over the country, Alpha courses are starting, as a forum for people to bring their honest experience and their awkward questions and painful doubts to a place where they won't be covered up or thrown out. It's a step towards meeting with God himself, not in a human family that fights to defend the indefensible, but in the individual human heart, in total honesty.
They pretend that their dad is not absent, when he is, or that he always provides for their needs and meets their requests for help, when he doesn't, or even that he doesn't abuse and frighten them and others.
Family members may not only pretend to outsiders that Dad is good, but pretend to each other: his lapses in compassion or integrity are glossed over as they assure each other 'How lucky we are to have such a great Dad!'
At its worst, the cover-up goes deeper: a person pretends to himself or herself that nothing is wrong with the way Dad rules the family's life and crushes its happiness.
But at some point the evidence demolishes the pretences, and at that point the family member has a range of choices.
- He/she can consciously try even harder to cover up Dad's failure to be a good dad;
- he can go silent and hope the other children manage to keep believing Dad cares about them really;
- he can rebel and throw Dad out of his life;
- or, he can sit down with him and see if Dad will listen to his concerns, share his heart, and explain why he acts as he does.
Some people become cynical about God. They suspect that all the happy Christians who claim to love him and get so fired up about singing his praises are doing a cover-up job for this 'good Dad' who seems to turn a blind eye to the fact that babies die, people develop diseases and deformities, and the innocent and vulnerable seem to bear all the brunt of the world's aggression.
On the evidence available, some throw him out without a qualm.
Others wrestle silently with their doubts, not wanting to challenge other people's faith in God but deciding privately it's not valid.
But others go to the trouble of trying to get to know him, not on the previous level, but questioning him honestly about their perception of what he's doing in the world.
If faith is based on forcing yourself to believe, when inwardly you doubt God's integrity or even his existence, it's not faith: it's a cover-up job for someone you see as needing the protection of human beings.
If God is God, if his ways are not the same as our ways but are - as he claims - 'as far above your ways as the heavens are above the earth' - then he doesn't need us to cover up for what we see as his deficiencies.
At this time of year, all over the country, Alpha courses are starting, as a forum for people to bring their honest experience and their awkward questions and painful doubts to a place where they won't be covered up or thrown out. It's a step towards meeting with God himself, not in a human family that fights to defend the indefensible, but in the individual human heart, in total honesty.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Prejudiced? Moi?
It's salutary but never comfortable to be confronted with your own hypocrisy.
I hate it when anyone looks down their nose at someone who breaches some man-made rule of etiquette or, in their view, lacks social skills.
It's trivial, superficial and unfair.
Also illogical: how can you blame someone for not knowing what they don't know? Or - if someone does know it's considered unacceptable to, for instance, pick their nose in public, interrupt a conversation or ask a stranger for a loan - blame them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them change their way of doing things?
But I have double standards. I'm not bothered if anyone mispronounces a word or lays a table with the knives and forks back to front, but I'm far less tolerant of people's attitudes when those people come from an apparently privileged, financially secure or socially sheltered background.
My hackles rise when (to use some recent examples) someone designates all prison inmates as 'awful people' - assuming the people outside are the 'good people' - or regards it as a social outrage that they have lost interest on their investments, or considers that doing your best for your children means giving your children the best of everything, leaving only the small change to spare for children who are starving.
But that's equally unfair and illogical of me. I'm blaming people for not knowing what they don't know, holding them responsible for something I find unacceptable, and blaming them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them to change their way of doing things.
And I'm assuming that because they have education, money and social status, these things should confer on them insight, compassion and sensitivity - which means I'm putting far too much faith in educational, financial and social privileges, which don't confer any such things.
God rescue us from the prejudices we don't know we have, and from the hypocrisy of not caring about the ones we do know we have but won't change.
I hate it when anyone looks down their nose at someone who breaches some man-made rule of etiquette or, in their view, lacks social skills.
It's trivial, superficial and unfair.
Also illogical: how can you blame someone for not knowing what they don't know? Or - if someone does know it's considered unacceptable to, for instance, pick their nose in public, interrupt a conversation or ask a stranger for a loan - blame them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them change their way of doing things?
But I have double standards. I'm not bothered if anyone mispronounces a word or lays a table with the knives and forks back to front, but I'm far less tolerant of people's attitudes when those people come from an apparently privileged, financially secure or socially sheltered background.
My hackles rise when (to use some recent examples) someone designates all prison inmates as 'awful people' - assuming the people outside are the 'good people' - or regards it as a social outrage that they have lost interest on their investments, or considers that doing your best for your children means giving your children the best of everything, leaving only the small change to spare for children who are starving.
But that's equally unfair and illogical of me. I'm blaming people for not knowing what they don't know, holding them responsible for something I find unacceptable, and blaming them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them to change their way of doing things.
And I'm assuming that because they have education, money and social status, these things should confer on them insight, compassion and sensitivity - which means I'm putting far too much faith in educational, financial and social privileges, which don't confer any such things.
God rescue us from the prejudices we don't know we have, and from the hypocrisy of not caring about the ones we do know we have but won't change.
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